Championing Independent Journalism. WikiLeaks & Twitter. Feel free to follow Student Activism on Twitter or Facebook, if you like. Over the last few weeks, pointed questions have been raised about the failure of the word “Wikileaks” to appear in Twitter’s trending topics at a time when discussion of the Wikileaks revelations and associated controversies have dominated political discourse around the world. (I wrote three essays on the subject, the first largely dismissive of claims of shenanigans, the second and third much less so.)
On Wednesday Twitter finally released an official statement on the controversy. In that statement, they answer the question of whether they’ve blocked Wikileaks from the lists with an “absolutely not,” then go on to provide an overview of what trending is and how it works.